Experimental indie-jazz for the beat generation.
Hailing from the Netherlands, the band’s third album was allegedly built around the base starting point of an acoustic guitar; although as the listener journeys through the songs on the album, that becomes less obvious. Straight from the off, the 15 instrumental seconds of Marvin’s Curtain Up, there’s a random kitchen sink attitude to the instrumentation and arrangements.
First track proper (well, one that’s not a random burst of musical sound) is the heavily Wilco-influenced Scrambled Egg, with its fuzzy guitar lines and stop-start rhythmic construction. Punch Drunk Love, which follows, adds string and woodwind instruments into the mix but still maintains the odd counterpoint of melody and varying rhythms. There are elements of 90s power pop band Jellyfish in there too.
Bone sidetracks at the start into Nirvana-ish mumble-land before lifting off into a parental advisory singalong. One thing is certain: this isn’t an album that stays in one place for more than a few bars at a time, and it keeps the listener on their toes. Moping adds even more rhythmic randomness and sonic variety with vocal and instrumental loud-soft dynamics. You can sort of hum along, but you’d have to concentrate really hard.
The Burrows takes things down tempo-wise, and the aforementioned acoustic guitar base is much more obvious. The spirits of Jeff Tweedy and Mark Oliver Everett then take over as this builds up to a baroque-pop middle part, with whistling. Barely Guillaume (esoteric title; a lot of this is, on early listens, lyrically obtuse) and Hole, which follows, veer wildly between the strumming of the former and the cod-mariachi of the latter. If the listener is expecting lyrical clarity, then they perhaps need to go elsewhere, but if Mark E Smith-adjacent patchwork snippets of life observation are to the listener’s liking, then this will be of interest.
Title track Human Assholes hails from the more experimental end of Wilco influence with a stuck single note underscoring an indie-jazz opus. There’s another stuck key at the start of Rim Shot/Event Horizon, which is a twenty-six-second sound experiment before the more conventional Tempo featuring Willem Smit’s falsetto/non-falsetto delivery; he goes on about not losing his tempo, and then stops the song before restarting it with varying rhythms intruding for the remainder of the song. There’s obviously method to the madness on display, although the deeper message is not always obvious, as the vocals often aren’t that high in the mix and when juxtaposed against the always varied arrangements, they can seem a bit performative to an impatient listener.
Tyres Skid does similarly with a reference to playing in Open G and then strumming the aforesaid chords before settling into one of the more conventional songs on the album, although that’s relative; drop the needle onto any separate part of the tune and it’ll sound like a different song every time. Smit’s vocal ventures into Julian Cope-land on this too. Object Permanence, the Fountains of Wayne-sounding penultimate track, contains the lines “Just because it’s common sense/Doesn’t mean it sits right with me”, which is pretty much the musical manifesto for a lot of what is on offer here; going from an indie chugger to a Butthole Surfers grind after a mid-song pause.
Letters from the Scentless Realm draws the album to a more pastoral, jangly conclusion; a reference to Smit being born without a sense of smell on one level, yet it seems more of an ode to the muse-like qualities of the tactile and sonically inspirational guitar, which brings the listener round to the album’s genesis.
Human Assholes is a difficult album to categorise. There’s plenty there to explore, although the listener’s tolerance might be tested, or inspired, by the constant sense of change and variety on offer; it’s experimental indie-jazz for the beat generation.
